I’m guessing you have a few old family photos with no names written on the back and no one left to identify them, whether in your family’s stash of photos or in your museum’s Collection. Or maybe you have a lot. That would be true for me on both counts. But help is on the way.

Last Thursday I participated in the last of a five-class webinar called “Caring for Photographs,” hosted by Heritage Preservation (along with AASLH, IMLS and Learning Times). It was presented by Debra Hess Norris, chair of the Art Conservation Department at the University of Delaware, and a professor of Photograph Conservation. It was a great course, with all manner of practical advice about caring for and identifying old photos and negatives. If you’re interested, you will soon be able to watch any of the five sessions online and/or access the many wonderful links and resources for each one, just by going to the “Connecting to Collections” website and clicking on one of the webinar recordings.That same evening I also started reading the book Family Photo Detective by Maureen A. Taylor, published in February, and immediately got pulled in. All I want to do now is read it!

And so it was, armed with my newfound knowledge from the webinar and a few chapters into the book, last Saturday at the Hatfield Historical Museum I was able to do some detective work of my own.

For our in-progress inventory of the Collection, we hoped to determine the age of this framed image of the Hatfield Congregational Church (built in 1849 and still serving its congregation!) and the old Town Hall next to it. (Click the image below for a larger picture.)A note written on the back of the frame says the Town Hall burned in 1928, so I know it’s before that. But the first thing that strikes me about the photograph is that there is no clock on the tower above the bell. Since our inventory is currently working on paper-based artifacts, the church files are mostly organized and I’m able to pull out the folder of historical booklets from the Congregational Church. In the Manual of the Congregational Church, Hatfield, Mass., dated June 1918, I discover that the clock was installed in 1891, so I know it’s before that.

There is also a stamp on the back of the frame giving the photographer’s name, and the words “Artist” and “Ambrotype.” (Again, click the image below for a larger picture.)

Reverse of framed ambrotype.

From my webinar course and Maureen Taylor’s book, I’ve learned that ambrotypes (positive images on a sheet of glass) were produced between 1852/54 and 1880, so now I’ve narrowed the field to a span of less than 30 years. As I continue looking in the same Manual, I come upon the following:

“For many years an old elm, the largest tree in Hatfield, stood directly in front of the present church edifice and the tree remained standing in all its kingly beauty up to the year 1868.”

Great! That narrows it down to 1852-1868. Next I turn to the Internet to try to discover when S. Bigelow plied his trade. I don’t find much. What I do find is a blog post by “Sarah Beth” about a carte de visite by S. Bigelow, located in Collinsville, CT, and her research puts him there sometime between 1861 and 1869.

Ambrotypes and carte de visites (small photo portraits mounted on cards) were popular during the same time, so it doesn’t help narrow my search, but perhaps S. Bigelow was not doing enough business to pay rent for his “Photographic Rooms” over Polk’s drug store (see blog post above), and he hit the road, coming north through Hatfield. Do we have other ambrotypes or carte de visites in our collection by this photographer?

From the Family Photo Detective and the Internet, I learn that the U.S. government levied tax revenue stamps on all photographs from August 1864 to August 1866 to help pay for the war, and since there is no tax stamp, it was probably not taken and purchased during this time.

I could surmise further that since the church made several improvements in 1867, they might have been more inclined to record a picture of the church at that time. According to the booklet titled Two hundred fiftieth anniversary, Hatfield Church, 1920, printed by Press of Gazette Printing Company, a vestry was added to church in 1867, “at which time the organ loft was built and the present organ put in place.”

So that’s where I’ve stopped – at least for now. What I know for sure is that this ambrotype of the Hatfield church and town hall was made by S. Bigelow between 1852 and 1868. Though I’m still left with a 16-year window, I have to say I feel pretty satisfied, considering I now know the image is at least 145 years old!

If anyone out there has any additional info on S. Bigelow, ambrotype artist in the Connecticut River Valley in the 1860s, please let me know, and I’ll post any updates.

Think how fun it will be to do this for the rest of our Collection! We need more volunteers! (Or more hours in our inventory grant.) For now, I’m looking forward to reading Chapter 11 in the Family Photo Detectiveon on photograph albums, as we have at least several albums we think are from the late 1800s – with none of the photos ID-ed. But that is work and a post for another day.

While acknowledging that more research and books about Northern slavery – like Robert Romer’s Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts – are available today, and more communities are offering public programming on the topic (like Deerfield, with Mr. Romer’s assistance), she asked us to remember that:

“most Northern communities have not unearthed, much less made available, information about slavery’s existence in their towns. Many communities prefer to busy themselves telling other stories, particularly stories that make them feel good about themselves.”

Like the Underground Railroad.

“While the Underground Railroad is certainly an important part of the history of American slavery,” she said, “and the North’s participation in its demise, helping southern slaves run away isn’t the only role the North played in slavery’s history. Before there was an underground railroad, there was 150 years of slave history in Massachusetts.”

Thought not acted on until today -- Jan. 1, 2013 -- Ms. Lemire’s words stuck into my brain that day when she said, “despite the region-wide attempt to erase the signs of enslaved people in the North, everything a town or an organization needs to tell or present a coherent history of Northern slavery is, in fact, still available if we know where and how to look.” She entreated all of us in attendance that day to take the first step in unearthing those stories and to make them available for all to see.

That first step happened today, a year and a half later, as Hatfield celebrated the 150th anniversary of President Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation with a nondenominational service titled “Let Freedom Ring!,” hosted by and in the First Congregational Church of Hatfield.

Rev. Peter Kakos, First Congegational Church of Hatfield

Mark Gelotte, Hatfield resident and First Congregational Church member

Father Robert Coonan, Our Lady of Grace Parish, Hatfield

Andrew Poirier, Smith Academy Class of 2013

We heard about child Hatfield slaves, about the prestigious town fathers who owned them, about personal responses; we heard part of President Lincoln’s Proclamation, read by Mark Gelotte, and what Lincoln was feeling that day, in an excerpt from Louis Masur’s great Smithsonian article, read by Smith Academy senior Andrew Poirer. We were led in the singing of African American spirituals by Rev. Peter Kakos of the Congregational Church, and led in prayer by Father Robert Coonan of Our Lady of Grace Parish, while Jonathan Bardwell, who restored the steeple and the church/town bell so it could be rung by hand at community events such as this (funded by a Community Preservation Grant), led the community ringing of the bell. At 2 pm, the time of the signing by President Lincoln 150 years ago today, we all helped toll the bell more than 150 times!

Let this day mark our pledge, mine and others, to honor Hatfield’s slaves and their sacrifices, by telling their stories.

Tomorrow’s post will start this process by giving my talk, with links to bills of sale for Hatfield slaves. And the following day’s post will give Glenda Flynn’s response to and recap of Robert Romer’s story of Amos Newport, a Hatfield slave.

With these humble beginnings, we ask the community to help us bring these stories and artifacts of Hatfield slavery into the light, where they can be shared with all.

It is often an interesting exercise to examine a piece closely, as we do when filling out museum intake sheets, and see what one finds. We note the manufacturer (if there is one), or whether an items seems to be handmade. We take measurements and describe the materials used, as well as the purpose of the item. If we know, we describe where the item came from or where it was found, and assign it a category, a condition and an era or year of manufacture. In the process of looking closely at all the details we can see, and especially when looked at with a group of similar items, we sometimes sees things that we didn’t notice before. Saturday at the museum was one such instance.

Local builder Jonathan Bardwell and two of his sons took a break from the Boy Scouts annual flower sale and brought up a handful of items for the Historical Museum, found or replaced during his renovation last summer of the clock tower in the First Congregational Church of Hatfield. The items ranged from a metal crank used to wind the tower clock once a week before it was electrified, to a metal wrench, probably hand forged, made to fit the oversized bolt that holds the bell framework (or “head stock”) in place.

Jonathan also brought in four pulleys from the church tower (used either for the tolling rope or the main bell rope), but upon closer inspection realized that only three of them seemed to be from the same era. The three wooden pulleys presumed to be from the time of the Congregational Church bell installation (forged in 1879), all used steel pins with wooden pulley wheels, and all looked like they had originally been painted a grayish color and probably made in a shop.

The fourth pulley (both housing and pulley made of pine), was a somewhat different shape (not as regular), showed hatchet marks and did not appear to have been painted. It also used hand-wrought nails and wooden (hardwood) pins instead of steel. As he noticed all this, Jonathan made an educated guess that the pulley he held in his hand was not from the installation of the Congregational Church bell in the late 1800s, but from the installation of the bell in the Third Meetinghouse, as it was that bell that was recast after it cracked “at a Fourth of July celebration in 1876”* and was thereafter installed in the Congregational Church tower.

As you may know, Hatfield’s Third Meetinghouse (built around 1750) was being considered to be listed on the state's Register of Historic Places – as one of the meetings of Shay’s Rebellion took place therein – before it was catastrophically blown into the foundation over which it sat, after being successfully moved from one side of Main St. to the other. But that is a story for another day. According to the Wells history cited below, under the reminiscences of Samuel D. Partridge, “I think the bell bore the date of 1806,” and so this fourth pulley perhaps predates the others by some 70+ years!

*From A History of Hatfield, Massachusetts, in Three Parts, by Daniel White Wells and Reuben Field Wells, 1910.

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Curator's musings...

As the curator of a small town Historical Society museum, I wonder a great many things. Am I alone in these thoughts that come to me while driving, or exercising, or falling asleep at night? Is it unusual to be constructing displays and writing copy in one's head for an enlarged museum space that does not, as yet, exist?

If you're wondering about the blog title, "Bird by bird," see my First Post for an explanation! Click HERE to read it.

When I'm not thinking about our museum or rehousing artifacts with my fellow museum committee members, I'm helping out with the Pioneer Valley History Network (of which I'm a board member), collecting or editing digital oral histories (see words.pictures.stories)or keeping track of my two teenage kids.